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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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I agree with you when it comes to a lot of things in terms of civic engagement, but in this case, there are lots of websites out there with information that won't even take you more than 20 minutes to read in terms learning of who the candidates are and what they stand for.
You can literally do that on a break (or more than one break since you'll get them every day) at work. And if you're not getting breaks at work, your boss is violating the labor laws which should be posted where all employees can see them. Not that they ever read them. Employees are entitled by federal law to a 5-20 minute paid break. I realize 5-20 minutes is shit, but most full time jobs at least give you longer unpaid breaks than that, if for no other reason than they don't want their employees passing out from hunger.
You're not wrong about having the physical and temporal capacity to inform yourself regardless, but you've also got to have the mental and emotional capacity as well.
I'm sure you're aware of how exhausting it is to live here, even just having nominal exposure to all the campaign ads and the outrage bait "news." That's before all the regular stress of living here with a family, all of your material conditions. Is my car gonna break down? If it does will I get fired? How can I afford my kids soccer cleats? Will the babysitter cancel on me for my extra shift?
If the only exposure you got for the election that you paid attention to because it was "entertainment" was a "funny" Joe Rogan clip your buddy sent you of the Trump interview it'd be real easy to be like "well, we made it through the first one, and at least he acknowledges that things are more expensive..."
Obviously if you're tuned in, you know that's a bullshit front. But if you don't have the capacity to be tuned in because fucking everything is designed to stress you out and extract what little money you have... Well, here we are.
I guess you're right. It's just so damn important to them and their families... I have been there, super exhausted from all that, but I knew the risk of not being informed about who I'm voting for. I guess it was enough for me to make sure I knew, but not for others.
I'm definitely not saying you should blame yourself for not phone banking or door knocking enough or something.
The system that we live in is just perfect for making us feel like this. And the people in charge are not incentivized to change it for us.
The only way we fix it is by trying to make things better locally, from the bottom up.
This right here is hitting on the real problem. People are fed bullshit from firehoses coming in all direction, so they feel like they are informed because of what they have passively taken in. It takes some real effort to step back and think "What if the things I've been hearing are not the full story?", and even more effort to take the next step and actively seek out information that might challenge what you have already heard and internalized. We are ALL guilty of this to some degree.
Precisely--it is 100% the point. If you are stressed out working 2 jobs and raising a kid, you are going to have a lot less energy to keep your bullshit detector running and the simple solutions to complex problems naturally sound more appealing.
Correct. Now your task, should you choose to accept it, is to show someone how to do that. Teach them to do their research. Easy? Now come up with a way to communicate the same message to maybe 150 million people. And make sure they don’t ignore it.
This is why strategies like advertising, canvassing, and media interviews are effective. Unlike expecting voters to “just do the research,” these methods meet people where they already are—at home, watching TV, listening to the radio, scrolling through social media, or catching up on the news. They reach voters directly, without assuming any prior knowledge or effort on their part.
I guess. I was told in high school before I was even old enough to vote that the League of Women Voters always gives out election info. They used to do it in a free pamphlet and now they do it on their website. Are people really not told that in school anymore or do they just not pay attention?
I personally wasn’t told that in high school. Also in high school I was told that consuming weed was a moral failing and that blood is blue when it’s inside the body so
I remember being taught all kinds of lies about weed for sure. I also remember "Officer Friendly" coming to my elementary school and telling us not to pick up any pieces of paper with cartoon characters on it, by which I think he meant a whole blotter paper's worth of acid?
And now that I am able to monitor my own child's schooling because she's going to an online school, but it's a public school and it's run by evil Pearson, the company that makes all the public school textbooks, I can see that they're still going with all kinds of bullshit lies like "marijuana is a gateway drug" and they don't even bring up the fact that there are pharmaceutical options when it comes to alcohol and tobacco.
But they sure did push that AA crap.